Americans eat more than a billion pounds of shrimp a year. What most Americans don’t realize, however, is that 90 percent of the shrimp they buy at the grocery store and consume in most restaurants has been imported from Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Ecuador and China, and could contain illegal antibiotics.
According to a recent report by ABC World News, shrimp from these countries are frequently raised in crowded pens in shrimp farms under conditions that promote disease. To keep their shrimp from dying in diseased waters, some shrimp farmers routinely pour antibiotics prohibited in the United States into their pens and import the shrimp to this country.
ABC had 30 imported shrimp samples from grocery stores around the country tested for illegal drugs and three were found to contain antibiotics that are banned in the United States. The tests, which were conducted at the Institute of Environmental and Human Health food lab at Texas Tech University, found the banned antibiotics enrofloxacin, chloramphenicol and nitrofurazone, which is a known carcinogen, in the positive samples.
Though the sample size was small, the fact that 10 percent were found to contain illegal drugs is significant given the amount of shrimp consumed by Americans each year.
About 10 percent of them showed evidence of pharmaceutical residue in the muscle tissue alone, which people eat, Dr. Ronald Kendall, director of the Institute told ABC World News. Kendall said two samples from New York averaged 28 and 29 parts per billion (ppb) of nitrofurazone. If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were to find a single ppb of the drug in seafood, the product would not be allowed on the market.
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